DxOMark Lens scores

To rank and compare photographic equipment, DxOMark provides three types of image quality scores for lenses mounted on a camera: the DxOMark Score, five Metric Scores, and five Use Case Scores:

What does the DxOMark Score for lenses (with camera) show?

DxOMark Score shows:

The amount of information captured by the lens for a given camera.

How well the lens and camera perform together.

DxOMark Score does not show:

The intrinsic quality of the camera sensor.

The camera sensor's performance under high-light conditions.

Key points about DxOMark Score design:

The DxOMark Score reports on an average performance of lenses with camera for a defined use case.

The DxOMark Score corresponds to an average of the optimal quantity of information that the camera can capture for each focal.The quantity of information is calculated for each focal length/aperture combination, and the highest values for each focal are weighted to compute the DxOMark Score.

DxOMark Score is based on low-light conditions (150 lux and 1/60s exposure time). We chose these conditions because we believe low-light performance is very important in photography today, and because photographers need to know how well lenses perform at their widest aperture. Lenses with a high f-number are usually more expensive, so photographers want to know if the performance is worth the expense. The score does not account for depth of field, and only considers performance at best focus.

DxOMark Score is a linear scale related to the largest print size that provides excellent quality. Doubling the size of the print requires doubling the DxOMark Score. A difference in scores of less than 10% can be considered irrelevant.

DxOMark Score is an open scale, limited by the lens and camera resolution, and by sensor noise. As we can expect these to improve, the maximum DxOMark Score is bound to increase.